Read Online Fire Logic by Laurie J. Marks - Free Book Online

sufficiently for her to at least be able to sense the hammer as she gripped it. The light of the rising sun was blinding.
    Lynton moved slowly through the lush garden, his white hair gleaming among the bean plants. Bald Dominy came out the open door of the cottage with a packet of food for Karis’s dinner. “It’s bread, dried fish, some cheese and a couple of apples,” he said. “Be sure you eat it all, whether you want it or not. A person your size has to eat.”
    She nodded. Dominy or Lynton had said these words, or something like them, every morning, all the years she had lived with them. She did not reply, for if she tried to talk she would slur like a drunk, since her tongue was still half paralyzed. The old man patted her shoulder affectionately. Before she moved in, he and Lynton had added an oversized room to their house to accommodate her oversized frame. After she moved in, thanks to their incessant fretting, she had finally put on the bulk to match her height.
    The sunshine chased the lingering poison from her paralyzed nerves. She said, without too much difficulty, “Something has changed.”
    Dominy shouted to Lynton to be sure to pick plenty of tomatoes. “What’s that?” he asked absently.
    “Something has changed,” she said again. She felt it, a shifting of the earth’s weight, as though the earth and stones were gathering up their strength for a great effort. “I feel an urgency.” She pressed her palms again upon the stoop. “What has happened?” she asked the warm granite.
    Most of the time, Dominy treated her like any other metalsmith. Sometimes, she did something that astounded him, and he would remember that she was a witch. As she looked up at him now, he asked diffidently, “What does the stone say?”
    “It speaks of blood and death throughout the land. That is not new. But it speaks of something else, a life.” She shook her head. “I don’t understand. It pulls at me.” She looked down, as though a child were tugging at her shirt.
    “You’re going to be late,” Dominy said.
    She stood up. His head tilted back, and back, until it seemed he was gazing up at a mountain. He squinted fiercely in the sun. “I’m not going to the forge,” she said. “I need to think.”
    “You want me to carry a message to the forgemaster, I suppose.” Grumpily, he took the food packet out of Karis’s hand. “I’ll get a satchel for this. Where will you go? Out onto the heath? Better bring a water bottle, too.”

    Far from the danger and stink of the furnaces and forges, Karis walked through lands too dry and poor to interest farmers. The sun rose up in a breathless rush, the rocks shifted in their foundations, and the seedpods of summer shattered open. When the sun was high, she supposed she must be hungry and thirsty, so she sat down and ate. Afterwards, she lay on her back and listened. A life, the deep soil said to her. Pay attention!
    When she came home, Lynton told her she was tired, and fed her a great bowl of vegetables from the garden. Dominy told her the forgemaster had merely nodded when he heard Karis would not be there. The sun hung low in the sky, and the only hunger Karis ever felt was consuming most of her attention: she needed smoke. Yet beneath that hunger, she still sensed the vague, irritating nagging of the earth. A life, it said. You must do something! But it never told her what she needed to do.
    Often, when Karis lay awake, but still under smoke, a strange thing would happen: her spirit would break free of her insensate flesh to take residence in a particular raven. This raven traveled with Norina Truthken, far to the southeast. Norina usually contrived to be alone for the sunrise, and on this morning, she sat on a split rail fence at the edge of a harvested cornfield, waiting to see if the raven would speak to her.
    Karis said through the raven, “There is a new presence in the land.”
    Norina rubbed her eyes, which were still crusted with sleep. “I don’t